Stateline Tasmania

Nicholas Shakespeare

AIRLIE WARD: Nicholas Shakespeare is perhaps best known as the author of 'The Dancer Upstairs', which Hollywood superstar John Malkovich recently turned into a movie.

Shakespeare came to Tasmania in 1999 and decided to stay after falling in love with the place and finding his own historical connection with the island.

AIRLIE WARD: Why did you come to Tasmania?

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE, AUTHOR: I wanted to escape from seven years of working on one man, which was English travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who had been all over the world and the one place he had never been to was Tasmania.

I came over to the East Coast and we saw this house for sale on this 9-mile stretch of coastal dunes and it was like falling in love.

I just looked out of the window onto the Freycinet Peninsula and felt I was looking at the most beautiful place I'd seen on earth -- and that's a conviction that all subsequent experiences have served to deepen.

AIRLIE WARD: It might have been a Chatwin-free zone but Tasmania, as it turns out, wasn't a Shakespeare-free zone.

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE: Indeed no and when I got back to England and told my father I was thinking of sinking all my earnings into a beach house at the end of the world, he said, “I think we have relatives in Tasmania," and this was the first I had ever heard of any Tasmanian relative and he produced this sack of old letters from my grandmother's basement in West Malvern.

The bag was like the colour of old toenails and in them were these letters going back 200 years.

And this was an example of one of the letters.

It was a man called Anthony van Kemp.

He'd inherited something like £2 million or £3 million, aged 16.

Two years later he'd got through it all -- women, drink, betting -- and his father was calling him evil and threatening lawyers.

So he escapes England to go to France during the French Revolution and this is the letter he writes to a friend on the day he arrives in France, saying, “Everything here is very cheap.

"Champagne four shillings and threepence, hair for sixpence.

"Every day high mass is performed for all the fish women “assembled with petticoats up to their thighs “which makes them cut a very droll figure.

"I hope before I leave the continent I shall pick up some heiress.

"Pray remember me to all inquiring friends.”

There's a gap of several years and the next letter is from Van Diemen's land and so I remember coming back to Hobart with this sack of letters and going to the archive and saying to the woman, “Have you ever heard of this Anthony van Kemp?”

And she said, “Yes, he's known as the father of Tasmania.”

Kempton's named after him.”

And I said, very proudly, “I think I'm a relative.”

And she said, “I wouldn't go round saying that if I was you.

"He's a man of whom I have heard not one word of good.”

So of course that inspired me to try and find out more about him.

So using these letters I decided I would write this book about Tasmania.

And I thought it was going to be the only link I would find -- it was good enough.

But then about two years later my mother rang from England and said, “I think you have more relatives in Tasmania.”

It turned out that a cousin on her side had come out in 1900 and there were these two old ladies living up in North Motton still alive.

I remember ringing them up and saying, “I think I might be related.”

They knew exactly who I was.

They had a picture of me and my mother and she burst into tears and she said, “We've been trying to find you in England.”

And their life was also extraordinary.

They had never left their farm.

The last time they had left their farm for a night was in 1943.

And for the launch of this book in Hobart on Sunday I rang them up and said “Could I ask you if you'd like to come down?

" I'll arrange the visit to come south.”

They'd never been to Hobart and they said no, it was too far.

In fact not only was it too far, but their sister once went to Hobart and her husband couldn't get her out of a shoe shop.

AIRLIE WARD: I have to ask you this -- what's it like growing up with the surname Shakespeare in England?

Did you have the mickey taken out of you at school?

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE: In England, yes.

I was called 'Shaggers' and 'Shagspot'.

But I was very thrilled last year in Tasmania when a friend from England rang up and said, “Do you realise you have a double in Tasmania?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “There's an 'N.

Shakespeare' in Burnie.”

And in four decades of wandering the earth I've never come across another N.

Shakespeare.

So I rang him up.

He was a lovely man, Nevin Shakespeare, runs his own electrical business.

So the book really begins with Nevin agreeing to take me on a motorbike ride to Yorktown where Kemp arrived 200 years ago.

So the idea is I will tell him the history of Tasmania and he will give me a motorbike ride.

So there was this very bizarre spectacle last year of this gleaming Suzuki motorbike with these two N.

Shakespeares on the back.

And I was thinking if we had an accident and our bodies were found in a field, what would a detective make of this?

These two men of roughly the same age with the same --

AIRLIE WARD: Must have been a very long journey, to tell him the history of Tasmania.

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE: I was hoping it would emulate the same kind of experience for many Tasmanians of presenting bits of their history they probably hadn't seen before.

In that sense yes, I was trying to equate one journey with another -- a modern journey with the journey that I'm hoping people who read this book will enjoy as much as I enjoyed writing it.